https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lella_Vignelli

Lella Vignelli (August 13, 1934 – December 22, 2016) was an Italian designer who was the founder of Vignelli Associates. She had "a lifelong collaborative ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas ranging from package design through houseware design and furniture design to public signage and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella.

Lella Vignelli, a Designer With a Spare, Elegant Style, Dies at 82

Massimo and Lella Vignelli at home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 2012. Together, they were a two-person design army with a shared aesthetic that was sleek and intelligent.CreditFred R. Conrad for The New York Times

Lella Vignelli, a designer who, with her husband, Massimo Vignelli, introduced a spare, elegant style to a wide range of products and corporate brands, attracting an international clientele, died on Dec. 22 at her home in Manhattan. She was 82.

The cause was dementia, her son, Luca, said.

Ms. Vignelli, an architect by training, brought a three-dimensional imagination to her husband’s graphic-design sensibility. Together, they were a two-person design army with a shared aesthetic — sleek and intelligent — that appealed to clients eager to express a new identity or to develop products with bold, modernist lines.

After working with Italian companies like Pirelli and Olivetti in the early 1960s, the Vignellis established an American base of operations through Unimark, their corporate branding company, and, later, Vignelli Associates, which they founded in 1971, and a sister company, Vignelli Designs, which began in 1978.

The Vignellis gave American Airlines its double-A logo and Bloomingdale’s its signature brown paper bags. They designed brightly colored melamine dishware for Heller, stacking fiberglass chairs for Knoll and the interior of St. Peter’s Church — the triangular structure at the base of the building previously known as Citicorp Center in Midtown Manhattan — from the pews to the altarware to the organ.

Their work was collaborative, with areas of specialization.

“We sort of break the idea together,” Ms. Vignelli said in a 1981 interview at the Parsons School of Design. “Then, generally, if it’s graphic, it’s in his field, and if it’s three-dimensional, it’s my field, but we always cross over.”

Ms. Vignelli had a special feel for silver, reflected in two objects she designed for the Italian silversmith San Lorenzo — a ribbed teapot and a malleable necklace called Senza Fine (“Endless”).

“All of this work bears the mark of clarity and simplicity,” Mr. Vignelli wrote in the introduction to his book “Designed by: Lella Vignelli” (2013). “Lella’s work is solid, timeless, responsible and — in its essence — extremely elegant.”

Ms. Vignelli was born Elena Valle on Aug. 13, 1934, in Udine, in the Friuli region of Italy. Lella was her childhood nickname. Her father, Provino, was an architect, as were her sister Nani, a professor at the University of Venice School of Architecture, and her brother Gino. Together, Nani and Gino ran an architectural practice, Valle Studio. Her mother, the former Ave Rege, was a homemaker.

She met Mr. Vignelli, who was from Milan, at an architecture convention, and the two enrolled at the University of Venice School of Architecture to be closer together. They married in 1957 after Mr. Vignelli accepted an offer to do design work in the United States.

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The Vignellis’ designs included the stacking fiberglass Handkerchief chair for Knoll. One critic described the couple’s work as “luxurious without being plush.”CreditVignelli Associates

With the help of her brother, Ms. Vignelli was accepted as a special student at M.I.T.’s architecture school.

Mr. Vignelli died in 2014. In addition to her son, Ms. Vignelli is survived by a daughter, Valentina Vignelli, and three grandchildren.

After working as a junior interior designer for the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, Ms. Vignelli returned to Italy, where she and her husband opened an architecture and design office in Milan, working with Pirelli, Olivetti and several publishers. She completed her studies at the University of Venice, receiving an architecture degree in 1962.

Returning to the United States in 1965, the Vignellis joined with Ralph Eckerstrom, vice president of advertising for the Container Corporation of America, the Dutch-born graphic designer Bob Noorda and others to create Unimark, a design consulting firm that started the trend of top-to-bottom corporate branding. Business boomed, and the company opened 11 offices around the world.

The Vignellis founded Vignelli Associates, with offices in New York, Paris and Milan, in 1971. Three years later, Ms. Vignelli was installed as chief executive of Vignelli Designs, which concentrated on furniture, objects, exhibitions and interiors. The company’s design work included the stacking fiberglass Handkerchief chairs for Knoll (1982) and the Serenissimo line for Acerbis (1985), a series of glass-topped tables resting on thick cylindrical legs.

Over time, Ms. Vignelli assumed the lead in running the businesses, while the more extroverted Mr. Vignelli became the team’s public face. “I am practical,” she told The Observatory, the blog of the Design Observer Group, in 2010. “Massimo is creative, but he is disorganized.”

For many years, her contributions were simply ignored by the design and architecture press, which often credited Mr. Vignelli alone for the couple’s work. This was a source of frustration to both of them.

Parsons School of Design organized a retrospective of their work in 1980.

“The Vignellis do not really have a style as such,” the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times. “All of their work could be described as clean, and it is relatively spare, but it is not austere. It is luxurious without being plush, and that takes a certain discipline, which is evident throughout this body of work.”

He added, “The best of the Vignelli designs manage to bring together visual pleasure and ease of use, relate to the history of design yet give us the sense that we are seeing something beautiful made in a way we have never seen it before.”

The Vignellis donated their archives to the Rochester Institute of Technology, where the Vignelli Center for Design Studies opened in 2010.

“If you do it right, it will last forever,” Ms. Vignelli told New York magazine in 2007. “It’s as simple as that.”

Take a careful look at El Greco's "Saint Ildefonso." The artist represents the saint in a richly decorated room. He is seated at a writing table furnished with costly silver objects. An otherworldly aura pervades the room; as the saint pauses in his writing, he gazes attentively at the source of his inspiration, a statuette of the Madonna.

El Greco's image of the Virgin resembles an actual wooden figure that Ildefonso is said to have kept in his oratory. The saint later gave the figure to the church of the Hospital of Charity in the Spanish town of Illescas, near Toledo. The statuette is preserved there today together with El Greco's larger version of this work.

In Cuba, artists are cut off from supplies and the Internet yet celebrated by a coterie of international buyers, a pipeline that is likely to grow with the U.S. decision to loosen its economic embargo.

Ricardo Porro, Exiled Cuban Architect, Dies at 89

Ricardo Porro, in 2007 in Havana at the School of Plastic Arts, which he designed in 1961.Credit"Unfinished Spaces" by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray

Ricardo Porro, an architect who gave lyrical expression to a hopeful young Cuban revolution in the early 1960s before he himself fell victim to its ideological hardening, died on Thursday in Paris, where he had spent nearly half a century in exile. He was 89.

Mr. Porro lived long enough to see his two National Art Schools — begun during a utopian moment in the Cuban revolution, then abandoned as counterrevolutionary — newly embraced around the world as the crown jewels of modern Cuban architecture.

His School of Modern Dance and School of Plastic Arts erupt from the verdant landscape of what had been the Havana Country Club, in Cubanacán, a suburb of Havana. Premier Fidel Castro nationalized the course in 1961 to create a campus of five art schools. He all but ordered Mr. Porro to take on the design job. In turn, Mr. Porro recruited Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti.

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Mr. Porro also designed the School of Modern Dance in Cuba, with brick domes and vaults built by hand in the Catalan style.Credit"Unfinished Spaces" by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray

Together, working feverishly, they created serpentine little villages of brick and terra cotta, meandering organically through dense acreage and embodying an Afro-Caribbean quality of “cubanidad” — buildings that could be nowhere else but Cuba.

Mr. Porro’s two schools have voluptuous brick domes and vaults, built by hand in the Catalan style reminiscent of Antoni Gaudí, that are almost bodily in their gentle embrace. Supporting them, and contrasting with their soft curves, are angular columns and buttresses that speak of the shattering force of revolution.

“In Cuba, Porro took the Catalan vault and made it dance,” said Warren James, a New York architect who represents the City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, on the Museum of Modern Art board. “He painted and sculpted with it. In a Caribbean context, with a tropical exuberant landscape, his architecture remains revolutionary.”

That was exactly his intent, Mr. Porro recalled in a 2011 interview with The Atlantic. “When I received this commission, I thought there had not been a good expression of revolution in architecture,” he said. “I wanted to create in that school the expression of revolution. What I felt at that moment was an emotional explosion.”

Before the schools were completed, however, artistic expression was stifled as Cuba moved into the Soviet orbit. Mr. Castro had famously answered his own rhetorical question in 1961 about the rights of writers and artists: “Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, no rights at all.”

Almost overnight, the art schools’ distinctive style was officially anathema. “You realize that you’ve been accused of something,” Mr. Porro recalled in “Unfinished Spaces,” a 2011 documentary directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray. “And then you realize that you have been judged. And then you realize you are guilty. And nobody tells you.”

That was when he left for France, where he continued to practice architecture, most recently in association with Renaud de La Noue in Paris. In the breathtaking Collège les Explorateurs of 1996, in Cergy-le-Haut, northwest of Paris, they seemed to channel cubanidad, Gaudí and Le Corbusier simultaneously — if such a thing can be imagined.

Mr. Porro was invited back to Cuba for the first time in 1996 and joined Mr. Gottardi and Mr. Garatti to restore and complete the National Art School. The process is “slowly moving forward,” Mr. Loomis said.

Ricardo Porro Hidalgo was born in 1925 in Camaguëy. He studied architecture at the University of Havana, from which he graduated in 1949. He met Mr. Castro through the brother of his fiancée, Elena Freyre de Andrade, Mr. Loomis wrote in an obituary on the Repeating Islands website.

Mr. Porro’s survivors include his wife and their daughter, Gabriela Porro.

In 1957, Mr. Porro’s clandestine opposition to the regime of President Fulgencio Batista placed him in imminent danger of arrest. He fled with his wife to Venezuela. There he met another great influence on his practice, the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, as well as Mr. Gottardi and Mr. Garatti.

Mr. Porro first visited New York as a teenager, when his parents expected him to be a lawyer, said Josef Asteinza, who is working on a documentary about the Modern movement in Cuba and who visited Mr. Porro last month in Paris.

On a ferry to Manhattan, the young man could not disguise his excitement about the city and all its buildings. Mr. Porro recalled his father as saying, “Ricardo, I don’t know the future but I know two things: One, you will not study law; and two, you will not die in Cuba.”